Who I am

I am a GNOME Developer on the Online Services team at Canonical, developing Ubuntu One. I've been a heavy GNOME user and contributor since before 1.0. I have done lots of packaging on several distributions, and even written an experimental package manager in PERL. I've been an Ubuntu user for a few years now, and have maintained a simple apt repo on my own domain, and now use Launchpad PPAs to provide some packages. I've been maintaining a few Ubuntu One packages, which are in main, as well as have provided fixes for other packages which Ubuntu One depends on. I also maintain several projects upstream which have been packaged in Debian and/or Ubuntu by others.

My Ubuntu story

I started using Ubuntu in 2007 after leaving Novell, and needing a well maintained distribution with updated packages, for developing upstream projects, that wasn't SuSE. Knowing already that Ubuntu had a great community, and matched release schedules with GNOME, I went straight to it. Since then, I've provided some updated packages that I maintain, or that I had patched, in an apt repo on my personal web site. After joining Canonical, and using Launchpad, I've been using the PPA system, and not a simple apt repo. Now that I've gotten several packages in Ubuntu myself, I'd like to turn that into more involvement in Ubuntu directly, and help others on the Online Services team become Ubuntu Developers, MOTUs, and Core Devs, to maintain our own pacakges.

My involvement

I've packaged icontool, ubuntuone-storage-protocol, and ubuntuone-client for inclusion in main, and have been maintaining these packages since they were approved in REVU. I've also provided several bug fixes to python-oauth (which have been sent upstream), and updated the package in Karmic as well.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

This is but a short list. While at Ximian, I maintained a majority of the Ximian Desktop 2 packages across several distributions. I've contributed to most of the GNOME projects, and plenty of non-GNOME projects. I wrote the Icon Naming Specification, and am a founding member of the Tango Desktop Project.

Areas of work

Maintaining the packages for Ubuntu One file sharing, I've worked with the platform team to get uploads into Karmic, meet deadlines, triage bugs, and get fixes for critical issues in Ubuntu One packages fixed and uploaded as quickly as possible, while trying to meet the schedule.

Things I could do better

I haven't done a lot of Ubuntu packaging compared to packaging for other distributions, but intend to work with more packages during the Lucid cycle, and I think my knowledge and experience are valuable for working on Ubuntu packages. I'm not entirely familiar with the full suite of processes involved in Ubuntu packaging, and look forward to understanding more of the pieces I don't, as I work on more packages, and encounter new situations with current packages I've already been maintaining.

Plans for the future

General

I plan to build some tools and improve testing for the packages I currently maintain and intend to work on packaging for other tools and applications. I will apply for upload rights for those as well when the time is appropriate. Eventually I hope to get more general MOTU permissions, and then CoreDev.

Comments

If you'd like to comment, but are not the applicant or a sponsor, do it here. Don't forget to sign with @SIG@.

Endorsements

As a sponsor, just copy the template below, fill it out and add it to this section.

Martin Pitt

General feedback

I reviewed the initial packaging of ubuntuone-client and ubuntuone-storage-protocol, which were done by Rodney and Rick McBride. Back then they still had quite a lot of problems which were fixed after some review rounds. From then on the uploads were pretty much exclusively new upstream versions.

Ubuntu One is a tremendous improvement of Ubuntu, and for this I would welcome Rodney to become an official Universe contributor. I would also welcome him to become uploader for the two packages mentioned above.

Areas of Improvement

He does not have a lot of Debian packaging experience yet. If he wants to become a generalist (MOTU) or desktop packager (~ubuntu-desktop) he should work on a couple of different packages to get some more experience. If he is happy to just upload the ubuntuone packages, this is not required, of course; this should be his own choice.

TEMPLATE

== <SPONSORS NAME> ==
=== General feedback ===
## Please fill us in on your shared experience. (How many packages did you sponsor? How would you judge the quality? How would you describe the improvements? Do you trust the applicant?)
=== Specific Experiences of working together ===
''Please add good examples of your work together, but also cases that could have handled better.''
=== Areas of Improvement ===